u/Ashiq_Luxline

When I started out doing this work, I thought my job on discovery calls was to look impressive. Show case studies. Drop terms. Demonstrate that I'd "done this before."

The newer person asks things like "what's your budget" and "have you tried TikTok, Meta, etc.."

But a seasoned professional would enquire about things like "where in your funnel are you losing the most qualified leads," and "when you say marketing isn't working, do you mean lead volume, conversion rate, or revenue, because those are three different problems with three different fixes."

That single shift in question type tells me more than any case study ever could. Case studies can be edited. Flashy websites with stacked client logos can be bought. Testimonials can be written by the agency quoting them. But the questions you ask in the first 5 minutes of a real conversation reveal whether you've actually had to operate against a P&L, or whether you've just consumed a lot of marketing content.

That completely changed how I think about credibility in this industry.

Anyone else stopped trusting portfolios as a primary signal? Curious what you replaced them with.

When I started out doing this work, I thought my job on discovery calls was to look impressive. Show case studies. Drop terms. Demonstrate that I'd "done this before."

The newer person asks things like "what's your budget" and "have you tried TikTok."

But a seasoned professional would enquire about things like "where in your funnel are you losing the most qualified leads," and "when you say marketing isn't working, do you mean lead volume, conversion rate, or revenue, because those are three different problems with three different fixes."

That single shift in question type tells me more than any case study ever could. Case studies can be edited. Flashy websites with stacked client logos can be bought. Testimonials can be written by the agency quoting them. But the questions you ask in the first 5 minutes of a real conversation reveal whether you've actually had to operate against a P&L, or whether you've just consumed a lot of marketing content.

That completely changed how I think about credibility in this industry.

Anyone else stopped trusting portfolios as a primary signal? Curious what you replaced them with.

Read an article in LinkedIn this morning which quite literally said:

"Don't use AI and you're falling behind. Refuse to learn it and you're done", bruh. Is there like no third option??

Use AI and you're now actively integrating, normalizing, and quietly improving the exact thing that every analyst is projecting will eliminate huge chunks of your industry by 2030.

So the smart move is apparently to enthusiastically train your replacement, and the reward for being really good at it is getting replaced last instead of first.

Both roads end in us bein doomed. One just has a LinkedIn certificate framed on the wall.

I'm not asking for a revolution. I'm just asking what the actual third option is for normal people who would like to keep doing their job without volunteering to dig their own hole. The "just adapt, bro" people never seem to have an answer for that part.

Not even mad bout it. Just find it genuinely funny that the official solution to AI replacing us is for us to help it replace us.

For two years we've been told AI is coming for our jobs. Lawyers, coders, writers, designers, everyone's apparently on borrowed time.

Meanwhile the companies building this job-stealing technology are burning billions every quarter, running back to investors every few months for another emergency funding round, and are nowhere close to actually making money.

So the thing that's supposed to make us all obsolete can't even pay its own bills without a constant IV drip of venture capital and pure vibes.

My job pays for itself. Does yours, ChatGPT?

Genuine question, not a gotcha. Just find it genuinely hilarious that the robot apocalypse is pre-revenue.

For two years we've been told AI is coming for our jobs. Lawyers, coders, writers, designers, everyone's apparently on borrowed time.

Meanwhile the companies building this job-stealing technology are burning billions every quarter, running back to investors every few months for another emergency funding round, and are nowhere close to actually making money.

So the thing that's supposed to make us all obsolete can't even pay its own bills without a constant IV drip of venture capital and pure vibes.

My job pays for itself. Does yours, ChatGPT?

Genuine question, not a gotcha. Just find it genuinely hilarious that the robot apocalypse is pre-revenue.

9:04am. First Slack message. Someone asking me something they could have found in the doc I spent two hours writing last week. I answer. Lose the thought I was building.

9:23am. Reply to an email sent at 7:52pm last night marked urgent. It's not urgent. That's just how this person writes emails. I've stopped reading them as urgent.

9:31am. Pulled into a Slack thread with 14 people. Someone asks a question that was answered in the same thread three weeks ago. I scroll back, find it, paste the link. Nobody acknowledges it.

10:00am. Mandatory sync. Eight people. Maybe five of them have a reason to be there. We spend the first nineteen minutes discussing the format of a report nobody has started writing yet.

11:00am. I open the actual project. Get about 20 minutes in before someone pings me for an update on a different project. The update takes longer than it should.

The afternoon is mostly the same. Threads. Loops. Someone asking for a status on a thing I would have already finished if I hadn't been asked for three statuses on it.

5:15pm I close the laptop. Eat dinner. Watch something.

7:40pm I open it back up. Slack is quiet. No calendar notifications. Nobody scheduling a sync to recap the previous sync. I do the thing in about 80 minutes. Cleanly. No interruptions. The same task would have eaten most of my afternoon.

The company sends quarterly reminders about protecting work-life boundaries.

HR sent the last one on a Thursday at 6:48pm.

Genuinely not sure what the 9 to 5 window is optimized for at this point, but it isn't the work.

A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with a client who'd spent the last six months convinced his "marketing isn't working."

His CAC was up. His conversion rate was flat. He wanted us to "rethink the funnel" and "be more aggressive" and a few other phrases that sounded fine in the moment but didn't really mean much.

So I asked him to walk me through what happens AFTER someone clicks the ad.

Long pause.

Turned out his sales team was responding to demo requests in 3 to 4 days. The pricing page hadn't been updated since he raised prices in January. The onboarding email sequence was still talking about a feature they killed in February. And his churn was around 11% monthly, which meant we were essentially filling a bathtub with the drain wide open.

Marketing wasn't broken. The business was leaking everywhere downstream of marketing.

This is the part of the job nobody warns you about. You spend years getting better at running ads, writing copy, building funnels, and then you realize a huge percentage of the actual work is pointing at things that aren't your responsibility and trying to convince a stressed founder that "why aren't we growing" doesn't always have a marketing answer.

Marketing is amplification. It cannot create demand for something people don't want. It cannot patch a sales process that's broken, a product experience that disappoints, or a pricing model that doesn't reflect value.

The hard part isn't seeing it. The hard part is saying it without losing the client.

Anyone else have a polite way to bring this up without losing the client?

A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with a client who'd spent the last six months convinced his "marketing isn't working."

His CAC was up. His conversion rate was flat. He wanted us to "rethink the funnel" and "be more aggressive" and a few other phrases that sounded fine in the moment but didn't really mean much.

So I asked him to walk me through what happens AFTER someone clicks the ad.

Long pause.

Turned out his sales team was responding to demo requests in 3 to 4 days. The pricing page hadn't been updated since he raised prices in January. The onboarding email sequence was still talking about a feature they killed in February. And his churn was around 11% monthly, which meant we were essentially filling a bathtub with the drain wide open.

Marketing wasn't broken. The business was leaking everywhere downstream of marketing.

This is the part of the job nobody warns you about. You spend years getting better at running ads, writing copy, building funnels, and then you realize a huge percentage of the actual work is pointing at things that aren't your responsibility and trying to convince a stressed founder that "why aren't we growing" doesn't always have a marketing answer.

Marketing is amplification. It cannot create demand for something people don't want. It cannot patch a sales process that's broken, a product experience that disappoints, or a pricing model that doesn't reflect value.

The hard part isn't seeing it. The hard part is saying it without losing the client.

Anyone else have a polite way to bring this up without losing the client?

A couple months ago I was in a meeting with a client who'd spent the last six months convinced his "marketing isn't working."

His CAC was up. His conversion rate was flat. He wanted us to "rethink the funnel" and "be more aggressive" and a few other phrases that sounded fine in the moment but didn't really mean much.

So I asked him to walk me through what happens AFTER someone clicks the ad.

Long pause.

Turned out his sales team was responding to demo requests in 3 to 4 days. The pricing page hadn't been updated since he raised prices in January. The onboarding email sequence was still talking about a feature they killed in February. And his churn was around 11% monthly, which meant we were essentially filling a bathtub with the drain wide open.

Marketing wasn't broken. The business was leaking everywhere downstream of marketing.

This is the part of the job nobody warns you about. You spend years getting better at running ads, writing copy, building funnels, and then you realize a huge percentage of the actual work is pointing at things that aren't your responsibility and trying to convince a stressed founder that "why aren't we growing" doesn't always have a marketing answer.

Marketing is amplification. It cannot create demand for something people don't want. It cannot patch a sales process that's broken, a product experience that disappoints, or a pricing model that doesn't reflect value.

The hard part isn't seeing it. The hard part is saying it without losing the client.

Anyone else have a polite way to bring this up without losing the client?

My name is Ashiq and I've built a digital marketing agency over the last 3 years.

Delivery team, systems, case studies, pitch deck, prospect research, contracts, automation.
Everything except a US-based person on the phones closing deals.

Looking for a partner who handles sales and US-side client communication while I handle everything else. You earn 25% commission on every deal you close, 10% recurring for the lifetime of that client, and equity in the US entity that vests over 12 months.

Specifically looking for someone who tried starting an agency and got stuck on fulfillment, or someone in sales who's tired of building someone else's company.
If you want a steady paycheck and benefits, this isn't it. If you want ownership in something you helped build, keep reading.

Serious only. DM me with - your name, age, occupation, current location, any related sales or agency background/experience, current availability, and why this caught your eye.
I'll respond within 24 hours.

Hope to see you soon partner!

My name is Ashiq and I've built a digital marketing agency over the last 3 years.

Delivery team, systems, case studies, pitch deck, prospect research, contracts, automation.
Everything except a US-based person on the phones closing deals.

Looking for a partner who handles sales and US-side client communication while I handle everything else. You earn 25% commission on every deal you close, 10% recurring for the lifetime of that client, and equity in the US entity that vests over 12 months.

Specifically looking for someone who tried starting an agency and got stuck on fulfillment, or someone in sales who's tired of building someone else's company.
If you want a steady paycheck and benefits, this isn't it. If you want ownership in something you helped build, keep reading.

Serious only. DM me with - your name, age, occupation, current location, any related sales or agency background/experience, current availability, and why this caught your eye.
I'll respond within 24 hours.

Hope to see you soon partner!

I built a digital marketing agency from scratch with full-service delivery team, CRM and automation systems, case studies, pitch deck, contracts, everything.
The only thing I don't have is a boots on the ground by an US-based person closing deals.

I'm looking for someone who tried starting an agency but got stuck on the delivery side.
You bring the sales, I bring everything else. This is a real partnership where you'll earn commission on every deal you close plus equity in the US entity.

I'm not looking for someone who wants a job. I'm looking for someone who wants to own & build something.

DM me if that's you.